Life Coaching

What is life coaching?

People use life coaching to start new businesses, make career transitions, re-evaluate life choices or simply make timely changes to their personal and professional lives. Whether you are a corporate executive, a small business owner, a student, an artist, a stay-at-home mom or a retiree, you can join the many who benefit from a coaching relationship. Life coaching is an investment towards overcoming roadblocks, recalibrating vision and intentions, finding a strong inner core in authenticity as well as actualising your greatest successes and satisfactions.

Examples of life coaching include:

• Helping individuals to discover their deepest motivations and clearest visions, paving paths and developing habits for true success. • Helping independent professionals find streamlined performance and cost-effective management, and actualise profound personal results over the long term. • Helping entrepreneurs find core leadership insights that give strength, continuity and a better bottom line to their efforts, finding time for deep satisfaction in the process. • Helping leaders develop higher levels of emotional intelligence, find an ability to be resilient to rapid change, and to experience outstanding results with their teams.

How does coaching differ from psychotherapy?

There is a big overlap between the de facto practice of coaching and psychotherapy. In theory, though, psychotherapy looks at addressing far-reaching emotional issues, often created in the past, while coaching helps often high-functioning clients address specific work- or life-related issues. Then again, many psychotherapy clients are high functioning, and clients struggling with psychopathology also need life coaching.

One way of separating the two is that a coach helps you explore who you are, what you really want and ‘how’ to attain it. This is achieved as the coach h
olds you in a field of exploration through questioning, listening, reflecting, clarification and suggestions. Coaching focuses less on why things came to be the way they are, and more on your current tendencies, skills, needs, values, what has not been working and how this can be changed. Of course, the ‘why’ question often still comes up in coaching, and since its answer tends to fall more into the field of psychotherapy, having a psychologist for a life coach can be doubly advantageous.

Some benefits of life coaching

• discovery of core values • profound and long-lasting change • personal infrastructure to support success • peace of mind and congruity in life • experience of freedom and true choice • small steps and giant strides • increased satisfaction and fulfillment • personal and professional growth • success as you define it • forward movement • continual reinforcement of achievements • effective focus and encouragement